mandag 28. mai 2018

Guild Ball: Hungarian Nationals 2018

I went to the Hungarian Nationals this year. This time I brought my wife & kid along for the trip, making it a long weekend in beautiful Budapest. Pro tip for the married: Getting time for tournaments is easier

View of Budapest from Gellert Hill

Things got pretty stressed during the tournament, 5 games in a single day, with very little time for breaks. So going through the pictures I see that I have way too little to do the normal battle reports here, but I'll give a brief overview.

If things go south, at least I'll have this.

Match 1: Corsair vs Ferrite

My first game was against Gordon Johnston, super nice guy who even gave a little gift before the match - a postcard from Northern Ireland, a couple of dice, and a proxy base!

My picks here were both the Anatomical Precision models, of course. Not so sure about why I picked Angel here, I usually prefer her when receiving.

Corsair kicked. The first round I grabbed Cinder and took her out with Gutter. Gordon tried to keep his pieces far away, giving me control of the center of the board. I know Corsair is scary - but I think giving up control of the center is pretty dangerous. 2-0 to Fishermen.

Second round, Alloy tried to flank to the far right on the pitch - so close that Angel was able to charge in and push him straight off the pitch! Not often Angel does a takeout... but today it happened. 4-0 to Fishermen.

After this, the Blacksmiths started punching back. Iron took out Hag, then I got the ball with Sakana and landed a goal. I cannot quite recall what happened next, but I pretty sure Blacksmiths scored. I finished the game off with the Cap'n himself using his legendary and scoring. Final score: 12-6 to the Blacksmiths.

Match 2: Corsair vs Ratcatchers

My notes here are pretty limited. I kicked. The game started off with Corsair taking out Miasma quickly. Piper then did a goal run with Pelage doing the kick.

The Corsair ball then kept trundling up the center, while I did takeout after takeout. Tentacles babysat the ball. Piper fell in round 2.

He did get one more takeout, I think it was Gutter. I kept beating up his models, controlling the ball, and using Jac to reposition pieces. I then finally passed the ball over to Angel, who closed out the game. Final result was 12-6 to the Fishermen.

Match 3: Corsair vs Shark

I was sure it was going to be a Corsair mirror and was pretty happy when my opponent dropped Shark. Getting the ball of Corsair is not easy for a Shark team, outside Siren. My plan was simple: Hold the ball, kill his models.

Shark scored the first goal, as Sharks do. But that was it.

I wish I had taken a picture if all my 5 Fishermen standing in a circle - with Tentacles holding onto the ball in the middle. The end result was 12-4 to me, after doing 7 takeouts - including the mascot.

I think this matchup is terrible for Shark. Getting the ball off the Corsair murder ball is just so difficult, and he has to do half of my work for me by feeding me his models to do so.

So, it's three matches and three wins! I have done much better than I expected, so already I am pretty happy. :D

Match 4: Corsair vs Pin Vice

I was getting the fight I was dreading - I have hardly played against Engineers. I think I haven't had any games since last year. I know they are good and a rough matchup for Fishermen. So I let blogging be blogging, took no pictures and focused 100% on the game.

My opponent got a good setup with Hoist and Ratchet behind a wall shooting things away, preventing drags, and I was not careful to keep my models 3" away from each other, taking a lot of damage that I should not have taken. Also, Pin Vice is quite the monster when she goes in with Tooled Up and Deletion. When I have played against her before it has been more football, but this setup was all damage and tanking.

I got Hag, Gutter and Tentacles taken out landing behind 0-5, before I scored with Angel and took out Ratchet going to 6-5. Pin Vice then scored a goal, there was one more takeout on each side, and then Tentacles again. I ended up losing 12-9 in the end, after Wolfgang had timed out.

It was extremely close, his only possible takeout at the end was Tentacles - who I forgot to heal back up. If I had not messed that move up then it's likely that I would have won on activations. But hey, with only two minutes left it gets hard to remember everything!

Wolfgang played an excellent game, and went on to win the entire tournament. Nicely done!

Match 5: Corsair vs Theron

Fishermen: Corsair, Tentacles, Angel, Hag, Jac, Gutter

Hunters: Theron, Fahad, Chaska, Egret, Jaecar, Zarola

Last game was against Jan Geric from Slovenia.

I am totally exhausted now. The Engineer match was really hard and went to time, and the next game was starting right away. My opponent Jan was kind enough to suggest I take a 10 minute break before we start the final match. Thanks Jan, I needed that! :D

I got an early takeout by using the Hag legendary and Fisher's Reel to get Corsair into position to drag. But, I got to see how ridiculously hard Jaecar hits when all the debuffs are stacked. I missed a critical 2 dice Blind, which allowed Jaecar a charge on Corsair, and then he spiked like mad - rolling one single 1 with all his attacks, he rolled 28 dice or something. This was exactly enough damage to take out Corsair.

I thought I was way ahead, and suddenly things were pretty even again!

There was a lot of crazyness with dodges, Pinned, Goad, pushes and so on to get things into the right places. Jan did a great job trying to make things hard for me.

The match ended with Corsair himself landing the decisive goal, on a 3 dice kick needing 5+ to hit. If I had failed then Angel would definitely have died on the next activation. In the end, luck was on my side, and I won 12-10.

Post Mortem

I am happy with how this all turned out. Going 4-1 and placing 4th was definitely better than I had expected!

It was a really great tournament. Well organized, and friendly people all around. I can recommend making the trip, and Budapest is a really nice destination too!

Afterwards we went out for some well deserved steak and beer at Stex House.

After that the vacation continued... here my son is steering some bike-car thing we hired out on Magaret Island, dodging pedestrians and buses.

We biked around, looked at the ruins, and spent a day relaxing and swimming at the pools there.